I learned last year that my Ninja is a Gestalt, or top-down processor, which helps explains some of how he sees and experiences the world around him. What does Gestalt processing mean? Psychologically speaking, it refers to processing information as a whole rather than the sum of it’s parts. It’s the reason his recreations are as detailed as they are – he doesn’t see things as individual components, but rather entire experiences that he is unable to break down. Watching him process experiences through play is fascinating and full of small details.
We recently flew to Florida over spring break to visit the beach with my in-laws. Ninja was reluctant to allow his newly acquired stuffy to go through the x-ray machine, and lectured the TSA team about not looking at his pandas private parts on the screen because private parts are supposed to be private. They were amused by it and promised strictly appropriate x-ray viewing practices. Upon boarding the plane he abruptly turned left towards the cockpit to meet the pilot instead of right to go down the aisle. This is very on brand for him, as restricted spaces and boundaries are concepts that do not exist in his world. He promptly charmed the flight crew, who took a picture of him with the pilot to send to us and doted on him for the duration of the flight. Apparently the pilot disappointed him by confirming that yes, you do need to know how to do math to become a pilot, thus reinforcing our regular reminders that math is used in life every day in some capacity even if you hate it. As we were getting ready to leave the gate Ninja declared that if the pilots crashed the plane and caused his loose tooth to fall out he would be furious. Noted.
At this point, husband and I know what to expect from these types of experiences, and Ninja predictably set about building an airport as soon as we got home. It will undoubtedly take up most of our living room for anywhere from 1-3 weeks, and includes the whole flying experience, rather than individual components such as a single airplane flying around the house. There is a runway on the floor made up of several long strips of tape, that includes a fast lane, area to taxi, and some practice areas for his toys to learn how to operate the planes. There is a concourse, parking garage, emergency vehicles, bomb sniffing dog, and jet bridge. New pilots train there, several flights come and go each day, and the pilots announce when they are arriving and ask their passengers to power down electronics. Typically when his toy pig Penny is at the helm, her usual flight path is down the hill in the front yard, across an old horse riding ring, through a field and back up to the house after passing near the barn. Yesterday he caught me off guard when he veered from said flight path while I wasn’t looking. It turns out this time it was Bawkish (he’s not sure if its a toy chicken or turkey, so he calls it Bawk-ish because it’s only maybe sort of a chicken that might bawk bawk, which I think is hilarious) was piloting and decided to take a detour over to the neighbors farm to look at the cows. His GPS tracker showed me his location at the exact moment the neighbor texted me to let me know he was over there chatting up the livestock. As one does.
The bunkbed in his room is also now a plane. Pillows are seats, the ladder is the emergency slide, blankets hang from the top bunk to separate the space into a cockpit and cabin. The cockpit has a hot wheels race track piece that he runs to mimic engine noise upon take off. There is a steering wheel and piece of packaging foam taped to the underside of the top bunk, with buttons drawn on it to represent the 107 buttons the real pilot had told him were up there. The cabin has magazines and snacks, and thankfully lacks a rest room. He pilots his stuffies around and makes announcements into a toy cash register microphone, while parroting his real life conversation with the pilot. He assures the stuffies that he is using math and that the computer actually does most of the work once he’s in the air.
His processing style makes it all but impossible for him to do it any other way, as something is not a thing unless it is all of the thing. Pieces or individual elements of things don’t compute. Once I learned this information, his insistence on attention to detail and specific elements became completely and totally understandable. He still catches us off guard, like when he stopped dead and dropped everything he was carrying to the ground in the middle of the concourse to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag hanging from the rafters. But knowing this information has helped prepare us for the surrender of space that used to be ours, and explain to visitors ahead of time that our living room is in fact an airport at the moment, please don’t put any chairs on the runway.
Nowhere else does he Gestault as intensely as with hockey. His daily hockey games in our house include it all, the whole experience of attending a game. He runs out of a ‘tunnel’ to upbeat music and warms up, then plays the National Anthem before the game on his music player. Simultaneous play/announcing takes place while he plays the part of player, goalie, and play by play caller. Effects include a Hess truck horn blast when goals are scored, and celebratory lighting via flashlight. Sometimes between periods he will retreat down the hall to his bedroom, where a rousing and impassioned coaches speech can be heard coming from the ‘locker room’. Occasionally multiple walkie talkies are placed strategically around the rink, while the Hess horn is blasted into one of them. This leads to an admittedly very impressive surround sound effect that amazes me in it’s ingenuity. Occasionally at the end of a game he can be seen talking to himself over in a chair, but not to worry- it’s just a post game interview with the press. For championship games there is a cup trophy presentation and celebratory lap around the ice. Sometimes it’s legitimate NHL teams like the Rangers or Bruins that face off, and other times it is teams from his own imaginary league – the Airlines, Dragons, Jack-o-Lanterns, and Team Under Armor are favorites. Sometimes he comes out in full hockey gear minus his skates, and other times the protective equipment is limited to a lacrosse helmet that doubles as goalie gear.
This processing style is the reason some neurodivergent kids struggle so much with a change in routine. An activity in their mind is the entire event, and if one aspect changes, it alters their whole gestault. Now instead of assuming chronic inflexibility and stubbornness I know that there is an entire cognitive process that I never knew was a thing. The education this journey has provided so far has been humbling and eye opening, and only certainty at this point is that there is still so very much we have not learned.
Comments